I turn off my alarm, pick up my phone and open Apple News to see that Sheridan Smith has opened up about her recent ADHD diagnosis, and my head is filled with just one question: how many women in the spotlight are going to open up about their late diagnosis of ADHD before we, as a society, step back and realise just how many women have been let down by the system and are in need of answers?

In the past couple of years alone, we’ve heard from Nadia Sawalha, Melanie Sykes, Christine McGuinness, Fern Brady, Paris Hilton, Olivia Attwood, and Georgia Harrison (to name but a few) about how the late discovery and diagnosis of their neurodivergence has changed their life. These women all share incredibly similar stories: they struggled through life, always knowing that they were different, always feeling as though something was ‘wrong’ with them, often battling through periods of horrific mental health while receiving little to no answers or support from the medical system about what was really going on. Then, later in life, whether that’s in their 20s, 30s, 40s or 50s, they were lucky enough to come across the world of ADHD, autism and neurodivergence, and all of their questions were answered – questions I can bet are almost the exact same ones I spent the best part of 25 years chasing around my mind.

What is so wrong with me? Why am I so sensitive? Why can’t anybody see that I am a nice person? Why do I find things so difficult to understand? Why can’t I just keep up with life in the same way that everyone else can? Why am I so lazy? Why am I so much more incompetent than anybody else? Am I a terrible person?

For me, life before diagnosis was a whirlwind of poor mental health, social difficulties, dropping out of high school, struggling to hold down a job, battling against myself to keep on top of even the most basic personal hygiene and being weighed down by an overarching feeling that I was broken, damaged or just generally a bit of a rubbish human being. Then, at the age of 24, I was diagnosed with both autism and ADHD in what I often refer to as my lightbulb moment.

It felt as though, up until that point, I’d been roaming around in a dark room with no light guiding the way, no understanding of what was going on with me and no way of figuring out why I couldn’t just function, feel, behave and live in the ways that everybody around me seemed to find straightforward. Then, all of a sudden, I was presented with this new piece of context as to who I was, and it felt as though someone had walked into that dark room, turned on the light and allowed me to see what had been going on the whole time. Don’t get me wrong; that doesn’t mean that the room was tidy or straightforward to deal with once the light was on. There was a huge pile of mess (trauma) that I had never known existed that suddenly needed to be worked through, but at least I knew what I was dealing with, and I could begin to start the process. Discovering who I was – an autistic ADHDer – was a paradigm shift, a new lens through which to see the world. 

I’m not alone in my late ADHD diagnosis or in the fact that it changed everything. The percentage of women newly diagnosed with ADHD between 23–29 and 30–49 years of age nearly doubled from 2020 to 2022, showing just how many of us are finally getting the answers that we have always deserved. That being said, there is still a long, long way to go: it is estimated that only 8% of adults affected by ADHD have a formal diagnosis, with around 1.5 million adults in the UK expected to have ADHD, but just 120,000 have been formally diagnosed.

Since getting my diagnosis, I’ve built an online community of over 400,000 people, and almost every single late-diagnosed woman that I have spoken to has told me the same thing: the signs of ADHD were there all along, it was just that nobody was looking for them. They had always struggled to focus, stay organised or keep on top of things. Their emotional regulation was ‘all over the place’ or they were extremely sensitive to rejection. They’d spent their entire lives feeling as though there were a million different thoughts whirring through their mind at a hundred miles an hour at any given moment and, in most cases, they had been very vocal about these struggles, difficulties and differences and had sought out help – often to no avail.

They had either been diagnosed with mental health conditions – I was previously misdiagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder, panic disorder and agoraphobia – or made to feel as though their struggles were a result of personal failings. Much of this is down to diagnostic criteria that were never designed to account for the experiences of marginalised people, as well as the fact that the image of ADHD that has been presented in society and by the media has consistently been the idea of the naughty little school boy: someone rocking backwards and forwards on a chair, someone who is disruptive and annoying to the people around them, someone who can’t sit still. 

However, I also believe that a huge factor in these women spending their entire lives undiagnosed, unsupported, unheard and gaslit, is the medical misogyny that is rife in our society. A 2019 study by Today found that 52% of women believe that gender discrimination negatively impacts their medical care, and a third of women said they felt a need to “prove” the legitimacy of their medical concerns and symptoms to their doctors.

This goes some way to explaining why a woman’s struggles with disorganisation, emotional regulation and concentration are not taken seriously as a medical concern but instead brushed off as being personal flaws, and the fact that, even now, as thousands of women and people marginalised for their gender (as well as other marginalised people such as people of colour, trans and queer people, and those from poor or working-class backgrounds) are speaking up about the relief, acceptance and validation that has come as a result of finally discovering their ADHD, they are met with disdain, disbelief and, in many cases, even ridicule.

When we hear the news that women like Sheridan Smith are bravely opening up about their late discovery and diagnosis of ADHD and just how much that means to them, we shouldn’t think “Gosh, why is everyone getting diagnosed with ADHD these days?” or make suggestions that it is becoming some kind of ‘trend’. We should, instead, ask ourselves the following question: “Gosh, how on earth did our medical system manage to let so many people down, leaving them undiagnosed, unsupported and misunderstood?”

Ellie Middleton is the author of Unmasked: The Ultimate Guide To ADHD, Autism & Neurodivergence

Images: Ellie Middleton